Zane Lowe - Masterpieces
I don’t often mention Zane Lowe when I talk about the radio, in fact I only really mention Colin Murray (amazing music, what can I say?). Back to the point….This week marks the return of “Masterpieces”. This is basically where Zane Lowe plays a different album each day (not interruptions) on the radio that is felt to be a “masterpiece”.
More information on this years masterpieces can be found here. But for those who don’t like clicking links the albums are listed below.
Radiohead - ‘OK Computer’ - 31 March
Public Enemy - ‘It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back’ - 1 April
The Libertines - ‘Up The Bracket’ - 2 April
Guns N’ Roses - ‘Appetite For Destruction’ - 3 April
Team working
I have been very quite recently on this blog as I have not had time to update due to my work load. As part of my degree I have to do a module that is a team project with another university. Basically each university has split their stage 2 students into teams of 6 or 7, with a team from each university being paired together. From here we are then given a project specification and have to create an appropriate system as if we were working in the industry.
This year we have to create an logistics system for Procter&Gamble and I have to see it has been very interesting. The actual system is not that hard to create even though we have had more work from this module than any other mainly due to the huge documents you have to create in regards to requirements, design, implementation, testing, manuals. However the work is not the point of the exercise: the idea is to give each student some hands on experience at team working and the problems that can occur. I would like to share my experiences (so far) in this team working.
I know it sounds a bit cliche, but communication is the most important part of working as an effective team. This was quite a big issue with us as a company (company = team at my university and team at other university), especially early on. One of the first documents we had to produce was a Statement of Work and this was where the first lapse in communication was shown. As a company we split the work up evenly and everyone produced their part. However, our counterpart team got feedback on the whole document and did not forward this feedback to us and ended up changing the entire document before the final submission. This naturally annoyed my team a lot and did not get things off to a good start but thankfully we had learnt that communication was vital and that we had to communicate more.
Other smaller instances of a lapse in communication have shown through more recently as well, within the company and within my team itself; I shall start with my team. The communication within my team seemed to break down a lot during the past couple of weeks as we started to implement the designs we had created for the system. I found that I had not been set any tasks by the implementation leader and that everyone was just going off doing what they want and chaos ensued. With duplicate files appearing everywhere we had to stop what we were doing and address the situation. Thankfully this has been redeemed with a task organiser called FlySpray. We had been using this organiser all year but only last week did we just put all the implementation tasks and then everyone just assigned themselves to tasks that need to be done. We are now functioning better as a team and being a lot more productive.
Communication within the company also deteriorated a bit at the start of the implementation. At the very start of this stage we had a company video conference to decide what each team would do and tasks where allocated. For some reason though when it came to documenting, our counterpart team decided to create the system architecture document, which was something we had already done. This led to a lot of time being spent trying to combine the two documents to get the best possible solution.
A part from these break downs in communication we have not really had any major problems working together as a team. We are due to integrate both parts of the system this Tuesday (11/3/2008) so I am guessing there may be a few issues here.
Well that’s me finished on my little summary of how may experience of team working has gone so far. Now I need to go tell the counterpart team that they are rubbish at designing and implementing databases….
